How to Use Marketing Automation to Improve Sales

Marketing automation refers to software that is used to automate marketing processes and increase the productivity of the marketing efforts of an organization. However, as effective as marketing automation is, you need to deploy it appropriately to get the desired result.
Below are the most effective ways to use marketing automation to increase conversion rates, and ultimately improve sales.

1. Use email marketing templates

To grow your business, you need a marketing template for email marketing, social media marketing, etc. Let's face it, designing emails is no walk in the park, and most templates come at a price. However, there are platforms that offer top-notch free email templates that can convince even the most pessimistic reader. As Best Email Marketing Software explains, free email templates are a useful itinerary because they save time and eliminate the need to hire an email designer or a programmer. This is simple, but should not be underestimated.

2. Reduce lead response times

Research done by Harvard Business Review shows that a prospect is 7x more likely to purchase a product if the response time is in less than 60 minutes, as opposed to over 60 minutes.

The same team of researchers discovered that over 60% of companies reply to inquiries after one hour. The best way to respond fast is to design a chatbot for that or ensure that an employee of the organization is always available for replying to inquiries.

3. Leads Scoring
Not all leads have an equal prospect and purchasing capacity. If you don't separate planktons from whales, you won't be as effective as you should.

Proper leads scoring is an objective system that grades the urgency and quality of leads without giving any room for human mistakes in prioritizing the lead to pay attention to.

There are different types of lead scoring tools, and each type has its own unique approach. However, most tools allow you to personalize strategies to fit the purpose of your marketing campaign.

4. Real-Time Alerts & Visit Tracking
Wouldn't it be nice to know when a prospect is thinking about purchasing your product? Marketing automation tools have the ability to track the pages visited by your contacts and the time the visit happened. For example, if a prospect read an article on your page a few days ago, and they came back to your website to make an inquiry, you will be notified that a prospect is surfing through your website. This also helps you to pinpoint the source of your leads.

5. Use progressive profiling
Progressive profiling is a strategy used by marketers to capture more data about a lead every time they visit a website—it prevents a recapture of repetitive information. When you piece the information you have on a lead together, you can then come up with a hyper-targeted strategy for such a lead.

6. Nurture your leads
It is important to take the time to nurture them by building a sales funnel that will achieve the marketing campaign's purpose. Approaches like consultative sales are relationship-focused methods that aim to develop strong client relationships. By implementing consultative selling strategies based on a customer-centric approach, sales reps recommend solutions that add value rather than insisting on selling a particular product or service. If you can prove that you know your customer and you can anticipate their needs, then you have a good chance of being viewed as a trusted advisor.

Conclusion